Supported by the Home Office, the National Crime Agency and the UK Border Force, forces from across the UK will be targeting suppliers and making personal visits to people who have bought the products.

Officers will also be carrying out a range of activities designed to raise awareness of the damage legal highs can do to health and looking at ways they can stem the supply of these substances over the internet.

Last month, the ECHO revealed how Merseyside children were playing a deadly game of Russian Roulette by taking legal highs in home and in school.

Cheaply bought over the internet or from other young people, charity worker Alison Hodgson, from Evolve, warned that legal highs were “more dangerous than crack cocaine”.

Today she welcomed the new clampdown.

She said: “Anything that helps to raise awareness of the damage legal highs do has to be welcomed.

“I honestly believe a lot of people are innocent – they don’t realise how lethal they can be because they are legal.

Education has to be the way to protect people because each time a legal high is banned another one floods in.”

Alison Hodgson who is raising awareness of legal highs

The crackdown was launched today and is being co-ordinated by TITAN (the North-West Regional Organised Crime Unit).

Detective Chief Superintendent Dermott Horrigan, the head of TITAN, said dealers are profiting from legal highs on a “significant scale” and that the public had to be made aware of their danger.

He said: "Just because a substance is sold in a shop or on the internet as 'legal' does not mean it is legal or safe, and sadly there are clever people out there making a lot of money by selling drugs under the misnomer 'legal highs' which may in fact pose a risk to people's health.

"The reality is that many of these products either contain controlled substances which are illegal or uncontrolled substances whose side-effects cannot be predicted.

"Either way, recent research by TITAN has established that people selling these products are profiting on a significant scale.

This week's campaign is about sending a clear message throughout the country as to the potential health risks from products labelled 'legal highs'.

"It is also about educating people about the consequences of using these products. These include damage to job prospects, their reputation, and travel restrictions caused through having a conviction.”